We’re perfectly happy eating in a Chinese restaurant. But will we start banking in a Chinese bank? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. As The Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei reported Wednesday, the Bank of China here in the U.S. has started allowing American customers to open an account and to invest up to $4,000 per day—and a total of $20,000 a year—in Chinese yuan, or renminbi. Until now, you had few options to hold money in yuan, which is a “closed” currency managed, and protected, by Beijing. The bank has three U.S. branches—two in New York, and one in Los Angeles. You’ll have to fill out paperwork to open an account and provide two forms of ID. And there’s a minimum deposit of $500. Is this a good idea? You may wonder why anyone would do this. Investing in Chinese currency may sound like something best left to speculators.

Women in remote Korawan, 70 km from Allahabad, have come up with a novel bank which exclusively deals with goats – accepting the animal as savings and lending it out as loans. In tough terrains of Mirzapur district, most of the people are engaged in crushing stone to earn a living. “Wives of these people help them in crushing stones and breed two-three goats for additional income,” Singh said.

Like this:

TechDirt reported that people are being offered different auto loan rates based on which browser they used to visit Capital One’s site. They got 3.5% with IE and Firefox and 2.7% with Chrome. I tried it and got the opposite results , 2.7% with IE and Firefox and 3.5% with Chrome. If you want to check it yourself, here’s the auto loan rate page.

This NY Times page from 1999 outlines the start of the banking crisis, when the deregulation became law. Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, eerily said ”I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this …” While Mr.Dorgan could not have been more correct, Barney Frank could not have been more wrong. Mr.Frank said that the deregulation did not go far enough. (see page 2) Incredibly, Barney Frank is still in the middle of the mess in Congress. If it is time to clean house in the financial institutions, it should also be time to clean out the Congressional garbage that deregulated them.